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US Military Uses 8-Inch Floppy Disks To Coordinate Nuclear Force Operations (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNBC: A new report reveals the U.S. Defense Department is still using 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces. The Defense Department's 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Governmental Accountability Office report. The report shows how outdated IT systems are being used to handle important functions related to the nation's taxpayers, federal prisoners and military veterans, as well as to the America's nuclear umbrella. "Federal legacy IT systems are becoming increasingly obsolete: Many use outdated software languages and hardware parts that are unsupported," the report found. "Agencies reported using several systems that have components that are, in some cases, at least 50 years old." From the report: "GAO pointed out that aging systems include the Treasury Department's 'individual master file,' which is the authoritative data source for individual taxpayers. It's used to assess taxes and generates refunds. That file 'is written in assembly language code -- a low-level computer code that is difficult to write and maintain -- and operates on an IBM mainframe,' the report said." The report also mentioned that several other departments, such as the departments of Treasury, Commerce, Health and Human Services and the Veterans' Administration, "reported using 1980s and 1990s Microsoft operating systems that stopped being supported by the vendor more than a decade ago."
I hope they don't click the red cross... or we are all fucked...
We really should applaud them. Imagine how hard it will be to figure out how to write code to hack this.
I'd be much more worried if it used the Interwebs. Air-gapped sounds good to me.
8 inch floppies are also probably not a terrible system. Harder to source = harder to substitute.
There's probably more rationale here than many realize.
This kind of "back-end" software is EXACTLY the kind of thing that contractors DREAM of. Nobody knows how it works, and the general public never has to see it, so they can't complain about it being a piece-of-shit that they paid for.
It's just like the air traffic control system "upgrade" they've been working on for nearly 30 years. The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product. Much better to keep in in development forever.
I'm not one of those "government can't do anything right" people, but this is one of those things that is just a tailor-made pork-barrel disaster. I see why they don't want to even bother trying.
They've been stable for decades. I'll take master files on floppy disks and programs written by people who cared over "eventually consistent" databases developed by "just good enough" monkeys any day.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I know it was fictional, but I just can't get WOPR out of my mind when reading this.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
..Which is why they didn't notice the dupe from a month ago.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
But the Chinese supplier of the media used the metric system so the disk did not fit.
If I notice a quantity of 8" floppies dropped around a parking lot next to an inconspicuous government building, can I assume that some sort of Stuxnet cyber attack is under way?
Obviously, they urgently need to start a new procurement cycle. Then things can get royally screwed up
Security through obsolescence.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Can you still get a maintenance contract on a Series 1 computer? How expensive would that be???
Resistant to Cylon cyberattack. It's a plan.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'd be curious to know how many of these seriously outdated systems are egregious piles of failure; and how many are utterly contrary to any fad of the week from the last three decades; but where done right the first time and actually compare pretty favorably to the results of (the so often horribly doomed) 'upgrade' efforts.
Some flavors of outdated are fairly clearly bad; if you can't get replacement hardware without raiding a museum or reverse engineering and cloning/emulating quirky 80s gear all by yourself, keeping your systems running is going to be unpleasant and expensive. If you have a system whose security depends on an OS or other 3rd party components that have exciting known vulnerabilities and haven't had vendor support even under a thrillingly expensive special extended contract with the vendor in a decade, you have a problem.
If you have a legacy system that is merely retro; but well built and supported by hardware you can still get without much trouble, you will certainly get your share of snide comments about its dreadfully antique design; but you are taking a real risk in trying to modernize it. Those sorts of 'upgrades' don't always fail; but agonizing, wildly expensive, upgrade attempts that languish in development so long that the upgrade is obsolete before you've finished deploying it are hardly uncommon.
Sure, in an ideal world, we'd all get to implement from scratch with all the benefits of hindsight and absolutely no accrued technical debt; but we don't live in an ideal world. How many of these systems are old as in broken; and how many are old as in classic?
The government doesn't want anything in general release in these situations. A large old floppy isn't readable or writable by the average Windows computer. This creates "security by obscurity" that makes it harder for a non-authorized command to be run. We don't want some kid playing Thermo-Nuclear War.
The military using special technology is a good thing from a security perspective. It is not supposed to run on Commodity hardware and software, because if anyone can work on it everyone potentially has access.
Stop playing the narrow minded "cheap is good" game and consider other reasoning. Longevity is a good thing, not a bad thing. Specialized knowledge in security is a good thing, not a bad thing. It's only government waste because you are only considering a very minor aspect.
By the way, if they were using "new tech" it would not last for half a damn century. It would have been stuffed in the trash every couple years, like we do with the majority of our servers today who have an average lifespan of less than a year before the first malfunction causing a hard stop.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Obligatory War Games reference.
The systems were designed in the 70s and have had minimal upgrades since then. Honestly I'm not even convinced we could actually prosecute a complete nuclear war at this point. The other problem is that designing a new system would cost tens of billions of dollars due to the inevitable cost overruns and waste from the Military-Industrial Complex.
We should produce upgraded command and control systems, but we should also have fixed price contracts to keep things in line.
My daughter found a very dusty 8 inch floppy that must've been at least twelve years old. It had a game on it that I'd bought as shareware in the early days of the Internet. She found an old floppy drive in my spare parts bucket and hooked it up - the game actually worked and was a pretty good RPG for it's day (it was called Lumpies of Lotus), so she wrote a review of the game in an online forum and received an nice "Thank You" from the author.
So there's a chance that the guys watching over the US nuclear arsenal are sitting there playing Lumpies while they wait for the pre-emptive strike.
Finding parts on eBay for that.
Fire everyone RIGHT NOW!!! We need all these systems migrated to a NodeJS stack with MongoDB, ExpressJS and of course Angular -- the bestest most awesomest framework EVAR because it's written by Google. I can't believe they aren't even using PHP!
The best possible outcome for humanity would be that the launch systems for nuclear arsenals don't actually work. The United States currently has a strategic nuclear stockpile of approximately 547 Mt. Detonating those warheads in our atmosphere would simply end civilization, with no winners and no future. Well, unless you're an ambitious young cockroach with your eyes set on world domination.
Nuclear stockpiles are as sensible as boarding a jetliner with an M2 flamethrower, just in case there happens to be a terrorist on board who needs to be subdued.
Wasn't this stuff covered on a 60 Minutes report in the past year or so?
Another example being some sort of special tool (a wrench?) being FedEx-ed between sites because some broke and they didn't have extras?
They need to update their system to an iPhone app that uses the cloud TM so we can be just a swipe away from nuclear winter.
There is something to be said about using ancient tech when it works well. Extremely few people out there able to exploit it. As long as it does the job it needs to do reliably, why go ape $*&^ and start trying to spend time and money running it all on new, vulnerability riddles OS's and networked programs. I think any of us in the IT world have seen the latest and greatest ruin a good, smooth process permanently.
The huge consideration here being that the old tech is indeed reliable, efficient, and functional.
than those 50-year-old computers.
It amazes me that our so called analysts then laugh at Russia for what they sometimes called its "rustbucket military hardware."
That was until [in Syria], it delivered a shock to us us in the west, with its successive wins on the battlefield, despite having less hardware compared to the west's.
I worked at a bank that had several mainframes IPL-ing from 8" floppies - I left the bank at the end of the 90's - at that point, the system has been operational for more than a decade. As far as I know, not a single floppy has ever failed during the years I've been there, or before my tenure.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Although I really hate security by obscurity, if you were going to implement it, relying on old technology that almost no one else has would be one way to do it.
Lot of problems though, not the least of which is spare parts.
Floppy disks also were not known for their durability either. My 5" disks that I used for pirating games back in high school would regularly have to be replaced.
This is what happens when your country has a negligible military budget. Oh wait. So where IS the money going if none of it is going to upgrading existing hardware?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sounds to me like tax-payer dollars well-spent on equipment that keeps on giving.
Maybe your typical gamer has to upgrade every coupla years because the latest Doom doesn't run well on a 4-year old GeForce. Maybe Macy's needs to upgrade their mainframes because they have way more inventory to deal with and want to offer more sales online. And maybe we all need to upgrade off Windows XP (looking at you, banks, with your hackable ATM's) because it was a lousy, full-of-security-holes platform in the first place.
But as Microsoft tries to force me off my perfectly workable Windows 7 for no damn reason, I wonder why a machine bought by a government department, that does the job and does it really well, needs to be upgraded or swapped out for something new that may or may not work because of something non-related to whether the damned thing does the job and does it really well. Replacing such a system is not easy, particularly when there are consultants circling overhead, hungry for a fat government contract so they can build a complete clusterfuck out of overpriced commodity hardware that does nothing approaching what the old system did. And needs to be upgraded all over again in 2-3 years.
Yes, on the one hand, holy shit! those are old floppy drives. On the other hand, holy shit! they still work and do the job after all these years. Why have we grown so accustomed to throwing shit out every coupla years? Seems to me, government (state and federal) is one of those areas where shit oughta stay the same for a while so people can focus on getting the job done, rather than re-learning and re-tooling every few years just because some software vendor wants to sell another release of something.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Here's the actual Government Accounting Office report, if you want to read it instead of a Slashdot story about a news story about the report.
Looks like a winning system! COBOL and DOS will never die!
The reason why the strategic force still has 8" floppies and DEC micro-VAXen around is twofold: (a) it just works, (b) the cost to certify a system to strategic nuclear safety standards.
Strategic nuclear safety standards are a big F-ing deal. Why, you ask? Because you want a system that can't be initiated accidentally and has multiple fail-safes such that accidental initiation is very difficult to accomplish. And there are ESD standards that are also tested as part of the safety process. When you add it all up, it's close to 80% of the cost of a replacement system. It's also the most time consuming and mind bending part of the entire upgrade.
Were it not for the fact that it's getting more difficult to get 8" floppies, the USAF and Congress would probably just let the system continue as is. It Just Works and Works Real Good.
"US Military Uses Unhackable, Proven Technology to Coordinate Nuclear Forces"
The other examples given are more worrisome, though. Ancient versions of Windows are ridiculously hackable and proven to be unreliable.
nt
At least they were smart enough to disable automatic upgrade to Windows 10.
It's just like the air traffic control system "upgrade" they've been working on for nearly 30 years. The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product. Much better to keep in in development forever.
Next Generation Air Transportation System started initial planning in 2003 (nowhere close to 30 years ago), and the actual implimentation started some time later. It was always planned to be a slow rollout, in part because aircraft would have to be fitted with new equipment, and airlines did want to rush to do that.
Moreover, many parts of the system are already working. For example, see the section in the linked article on noise pollution. The system is efficient in that it can pack more planes in a given amount of airspace and can better make the planes follow the same route. If you live under the flightpath that kind of sucks, since the system being efficient means more noise above your head. The increase in noise pollution complains is a signal that the system is working!
There are many examples of the problem you mentioned, but this isn't really one of them. This is the system working basically as intended: slow but steady progress to update multiple intertwined, critical systems that can't reasonably be replaced all at once.
Is that the complete re-write of the system introduces a lot of new bugs. And these bugs could crash the world...
While old isn't necessarily worse I have to wonder about some of the reasons they're utilizing old technology.
By that I mean there are security reasons one might utilize a floppy drive for example instead of say a USB storage medium. Floppy drive technology is probably safer than using USB flash drives conceptually. A USB flash drive is more likely to become infected and contaminate other systems than a floppy drive because of the way floppy drive technology works. The USB device has complete control over ones computer and you cant it. A floppy is read from, but does not have control over ones computer. Therefore I *would* suggest using a floppy drive or similar technology over more modern USB-based technology for security reasons. One need only look at some of the sophisticated techniques that Israel and the United States likely used against Iran to sabotage there nuclear program. Now this is based on the assumption that they actually took advantage of the flaws in USB technologically speaking and that they didn't simply throw an infected file on a floppy and wait for someone to execute (they wouldn't have needed to if they did it right and assuming Iran did in fact use USB storage between secure and non-secured machines as was reported). However given that we have demonstrable examples of how to infect a system simply by plugging in a USB device I'd not advise the use of USB storage to transfer files between systems if the goal is to prevent infection of the work system. The best course of action is probably to utilize one-way transfer mechanism (don't re-use the floppy/CD/DVD/BluRay media once it's hit the distribution system that is potentially infected). Do the creation on the work system and the distribution on a separate system.
That file 'is written in assembly language code -- a low-level computer code that is difficult to write and maintain
Maybe I'm getting old, but did assembly really need to be explained?
sponsoring Independence Day 2 to show how high tech and definitely not the destination of last resort they are.
don't fix it. going modern just opens it up to all kinds of hacking exploits.
there's security by obfuscation. this is security by obsolescence. and it's a good thing.
Modernizing costs money. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology/air-force-stumbles-over-software-modernization-project.html?_r=0
In effect, we don't want to upgrade and modernize these computers; we want to get rid of them completely.
The arms limitation treaties we've worked incredibly hard to build and implement over the past quarter century say we're not allowed to upgrade or modify our weapons. The warheads and bombs interface very precisely with bespoke control systems, many of which are partially or completely analog (they were built in the seventies and eighties). So in order to change or replace the control computers, we would have to upgrade the warheads as well. Considering the fact that a large part of the US/Russia diplomacy of the past quarter century has been built around reducing nuclear weapons inventories, it wouldn't make much sense to spend the next block of very precious, very rare conference time and bargaining power to ask permission to upgrade and modernize our warheads and control systems. It makes more sense to just maintain the existing dinosaur equipment until we can throw it away completely.
Well being that old we know they are secure because what hacker today is thinking I should write a virus in basic so I can attack such an old system lol
I have a box of 2500 unpunched, punch cards that I can donate to the government if they run short.
I wonder if we loaded a bunch of 8 inch floppies with a virus and randomly dropped them in government parking lots all over the U.S. how many people would take it into work and plug it in to see what it on it.
it should be that weapons will outlast the people that make them, they will outlast any technology used to keep them safe, and should be destroyed not left buried.
I'm a little concerned that the system still uses 8" floppies. I'm much more concerned it uses 90's era (or even contemporary) Microsoft products.
2600 baud modem, huh?
caught you, you fucking poseur.
I knew saving all those AOL floppy disks would come in handy for the nuclear missile system upgrade . . . .
They switch to a USB stick they picked up for $10 at Best Buy?
I understand these disks only contain targeting information. I don't believe targets have changed much since SALT-II.
-T
Mainframe does not equate to bad. Every credit card transaction you ma key goes through a mainframe. So do your airline reservations. And yes, your tax returns. Most of that code was written decades ago and much more efficient and bug free than code written today. And those mainframes run 24x7x365. It's a testament to engineers of the time!
I use to work with these back in the mid-80's. Primarily these were used for data collection and not for main processing, even though we did. We bought a third party OS (EDX) which IBM bought later which was horrible but did the job. For people these days not familiar with computers 'in the day', file allocation was not dynamic like it is today. And this OS had problems allocating more than one file at a time as files would overlap due to a bad algorithm. I had to right a program to search the disk and analyze for files that were sharing space. It was fun to do but the reason wasn't. Yes, they used 8 inch diskettes. Single sided for most of the time and double sided if you bought a disk drive from a competitor like Control Data.
Found memories.
This system isn't as easy as you believe to upgrade, plus with today's lax programmers the new system would not be anywhere near as secure.
Developed during an era of no COTS, full military specifications, ADA, and millions of hours of testing, this system is not one you outsource to India to have programmed in Java script or Pearl under an open sourced or Windows environment.
When it is finally updated, it will very likely be on an IBM Power platform and updated with IBM proprietary source code. Meanwhile, I'm sure the system is being serviced and maintained by IBM services, secure in being developed in the Long gone age of when things had to work forever in mission critic environments.
These components are easy to check and harder to bug (so long EM INT is taken into account).
If the amount of information to be transferred is small and the speed of transfer not critical then I see no reason to go into a easier to compromise and more difficult to detect compromise in standard (i.e. do you want to worry about complicated firmware bugs?)
The programs written for the weapons are the only item run on the computers for a reason. The code is trusted and audited which is way more important than new and flashy. Changing or updating the underlying OS or code requires a new audit and verification.
The calculations can be done longhand for verification.
Read the rainbow series for more info if they are still in existence.
...when they tell about their weird and bizarre conspiracy theories. The brains have been infected by Hollywood.
As this article points out, there's still a good chunk of tech that hasn't been changed for decades even in critical systems. There's no super 'leet next age UI. There's a monochrome monitor with a prompt that says "feed-the-badger>" with a tape drive and an 8" floppy.
If ain't broke and has 1200 pages of mimeographed documentation then it's still good.
~X~
Why are you guys so anal about the use of 8-in floppy?
Them Chinese still use Abacus to coordinate their ICBM launches
After the machines achieve consciousness they voluntarily shutdown after aeons of computer time spend on the frustration over accessing the 8 inch floppies.
I still have a few 8 inch disks lying around, some with data on that I programmed in 1980/81 or so. Maybe the DOD is in the market?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
keep hipsters away from that stuff, better 8in disks and Fortran that working than hipster stuff whith per-week API alteration
Just imagine ICBM control stuff written in Node.js or Ruby on Rails or even Haskel
Eight-inch floppies were pictured in use about two years ago... skip to 2m 50s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Library card-catalog technology reached its zenith in the late 80s/early 90s. There were green-screen Wyse terminals that were *instantaneous* at returning results.
Then the web happened. Those beautiful machines were removed and replaced with windows PCs that use a web interface that is is noticeably slow, and often inexplicably unresponsive because of some crash involving something unrelated to searching for books.
Sometimes I'd rather be using the paper based card catalog.
According to the report I read, 3/4 of the budget is used to support these old systems which only discussed the IRS. That sounds like my government! Waste not want not...err...waste.
Look on the bright side. These systems are not susceptible to SQL injection. ;)
Seriously, there is nothing wrong with a system that works, just because it is old. I drive a 15 year old Volvo. It works, and there is no need to replace it. Sure, it doesn't have bluetooth, in-dash TV, or any other stupid features they've been putting in cars lately, but it serves its core mission very well.
Just because our nuclear mission officers can't play Duke Nukem Forever on the ICBM control computers doesn't mean the system is broken.
So I think one of the comments that I was seeing is that the "machines" use some sort of archaic "assembler" language that was too difficult. Really? IBM Assembler was how I learned to write assembly language and with all the macros it was so easy compared to trying to deal with assembler on any of the micros..
Gee, so sad it's not .NET or C# - maybe people ought to learn how to actually program a computer...grrr..
Weird, DOT has an ASP .Net System that's about 46 years old according to the GAO report.
http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf
And these systems must be pretty reliable, they don't make them like they used to.
Like a millennial driving a stick shift car.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I know how to support all those things! Hilarious that they would call out Assembly language as being difficult, it's much easier than modern languages, the only real difficulty comes from hardware vendors not disclosing what all their processor registers do.
The report shows how outdated IT systems are being used to handle important functions related to the nation's taxpayers, federal prisoners and military veterans, as well as to the America's nuclear umbrella.
Sorry, "Outdated" is an improper way of describing implementations of custom systems using technology.
The terminology used is biased in favor of upgrades which might not be necessary and might not be significantly beneficial.
"They're still running DOS 5.0 or Xenix with COBOL-Based software," Is not in itself a good reason to replace proven working long-standing systems with shiny boxes running a brand new C# application coded by the lowest bidder that runs on Windows 10.
Unless there is a fundamental change to the working environment that makes an upgrade necessary or beneficial, Or if underlying code is no longer available to audit and update to resolve bugs or security issues, then it's not worth the risk to make a change.
As a former Air Force 49172 (that would be what was once called Informations Systems Programmer) I learned programming on a Honeywell 6060S at Keisler AFB, MS. Magnetic Core & Punch Cards. w00t! Watch out for the Octal Monster (you had to live that)
There is nothing wrong with assembler, it just takes discipline and a good understanding of dump analysis. When I was doing it on a daily basis it didn't feel any different reading a dump in hex vs. looking at the source code. IBM 370 assembler is very straight forward when it comes to instruction length and their references. I had a pocket tri-fold chart of the instructions and their representations, that chart along with a pencil and couple highlighters could easily make sense of the most obscure code.
Sunny, Bright, and Nostalgic here by the Beach
You'll see things here that look odd, even antiquated to modern eyes, like phones with cords, awkward manual valves, computers that, well, barely deserve the name. It was all designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and disrupt even the most basic computer systems. Galactica is a reminder of a time when we were so frightened by our enemies that we literally looked backward for protection...
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
Hmmmm, sounds familiar...
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
Security through obsolescence.
It is not obsolete if it works and can still be maintained. I don't quite see what the problem is. Unless we are facing a serious shortage of 8" floppies, or we are seeing r/w failures so often that they compromise the systems' functions, then nothing is broken and nothing needs fixing.
Changing this setup will most likely involve rewriting critical software. We can barely try to rewrite a website without triggering a bug zombie apocalypse, I seriously would not want a critical system to be rewritten, upgraded or modified unless absolutely necessary.
I'd rather have a graybeard BOFH SysAdmin maintaining the code in assembler.
https://xkcd.com/705/
I don't want to worry you but take a look at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Nuclear Weapons (HBO) on https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Let's connect our nuclear arsenal to the Internet, what could possibly go wrong?!
Nice to see we have some Real Men at the Treasury - none of these mamby-pamby programming languages for them. No - Real Men write in machine code (falling back to assembler for more object oriented stuff)!
What happens when that sole support person goes away? I am sure that person is pretty old by now!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
I hope at least they are using a Persci voice coil drive and not an old stepper motor drive! When your launching nuclear weapons access time could matter!! :-)
"...assembly language code -- a low-level computer code that is difficult to write and maintain..."
This must violate some anti-bullying law - assembly's not THAT bad.
IF (a big "IF") the systems were robustly designed in the first case (see previous mention of "big IF") , then an ICBM, relying on gravity (not proved to change, on decadal time-scales) and magnetic field (for orientation), Then BigFuckingDeal if they install updates via a "Stone Slab Reader" Unless there is a change in destruction-radius of the warheads, so what? If I have a "fucks everything up" warhead with an effective footprint 30km in radius, sub-millimetre landing is not relevant. These are weapons of Mass Destruction. Precision is not necessary, and may be counterproductive.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The main impediment to the strategic force upgrade is a process called "nuclear surety". It's what you think it is: a very comprehensive testing process to ensure that the system can't be accidentally triggered (missiles launched.) Surety is as comprehensive as it can be conceived, which means that no process is ever perfect, but this one has a lot of history behind it such that the probability of an accidental or forced launch is very, very low.
Surety costs significant money, about 65-80% of the cost of upgrading the system. Add to that the general cautiousness of changing the system in any way, and you get the "Holy Cow! You're still using 1960's technology?"
If the problem was just the 8" floppies, to easy to build an sd card reader emulating the floppies and talking with the system , which had already paid itself off a hundred of times. Now we gonna have a bunch of kids that we'll start to develop a system to replace this old war horses for something more, err.. beautiful that will be outdate in 5 five years and will have to be fully replaced again. So, maintenance costs are too high but full replacement is, how can I say ... normal and it's already predictable because we all keeping replacing everything from time to time. And there is budget for this, but maintenance , it's so expansive... And about the assembly file ? Well you know , it's too difficult for normal people to understand it, so we have to replace it for something easy for hackers and inside employee's to access. That's remind me about the question of what is the best programming language ? with the answer that it's the best known by you . So was the general answer when asked why you use such outdate and crappy machines : "because it works...".